Michael Armitage: Paradise Edict
22 May - 19 September, 2021
Michael Armitage is a Kenyan-born artist who works between Nairobi and London. His colourful, dreamlike paintings are loaded with provocative perspectives that play with visual narratives and challenge cultural assumptions, exploring politics, history, civil unrest and sexuality.
Made using Lubugo bark cloth, a culturally important material made of tree bark by the Baganda people in Uganda, many of his large-scale works draw on contemporary events, combining these with Western painting motifs.
This spring – just over 10 years since Armitage graduated from the Royal Academy Schools – we bring together 15 of his large-scale paintings from the past six years, exploring East African landscapes, politics and society.
Paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, 1952–1976
17 June - 18 September, 2021
Gagosian is pleased to present Imagining Landscapes: Paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, 1952–1976, an exhibition of thirteen paintings from the collection of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, several of which have never been exhibited before.
The references to landscape that are inherent in these paintings shift between subtle and explicit, as critic E. C. Goossen observed in 1958. All are characterized by an extraordinary variety of line and color. The earliest of them—painted in 1952, before Frankenthaler’s breakthrough development of soak-stain painting later that year with Mountains and Sea—is the work of an already mature artist: an invented panorama with suggestions of palm fronds and mountain peaks. The next belongs to a small group of canvases with drawn forms that Frankenthaler painted on her honeymoon with Robert Motherwell in the southwest of France. And four canvases from 1961—Fable, Beach Scene, Square Figure, and After Rubens—show her simplifying her drawing and making it more calligraphic, even as she continued to create figural as well as landscape references.
Anna Freeman Bentley: The Armory Show… In London
9 September - 18 September, 2021
The works presented at the gallery and online represent a continuation and development of the themes and subjects of her 2020 solo exhibition ‘Collected & Composed’, Freeman Bentley focuses here on the controlled chaos of flea-markets and junk shops. From these ready-made eclectic interior compositions she edits and re-expresses in exquisite colour and form the strange and beguiling nature of the ‘random’ environment – suggesting deeply personal human narratives, whilst maintaining the total depopulation of the picture plane that has become a signature of her work.
Maya Balcioglu
29 July - 18 September, 2021
Born in Istanbul in 1955, she arrived in London in 1977. Studied at Brighton (because it was by the sea) graduating in 1982 and the Slade School of Fine Art, London, graduating in 1984 supporting her own education by working in factories, night shifts and catering jobs. She collaborated with Stuart Brisley on The Cenotaph Project (1987-1991) and edited the publication for this project. Decided to mirror a business and set up a shop as an experimental space and a proposal to test ideas in public with an immediate and unambiguous risk element. This space was established within the commercial paradigm, failure was real and meant serious losses. It had a core identity established by presenting certain ‘goods’, other than that it had no ambitions as a business and its purpose was kept deliberately unclear. The flexibility of the speculation proved to be a light footed success. The “shop” was voted as one of the best 50 in the world. At the height of its success the business was no longer relevant. It became a model for others to follow, and therefore was closed. Maya Balcioglu is part of the curatorial team of the Museum of Ordure.
Sam Nhlengethwa: Jazz and Blues at Night
12 August - 18 September, 2021
Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Jazz and Blues at Night, a new series of prints, tapestries and mixed media collage works by Sam Nhlengethwa, paying homage to the musicians that have inspired him throughout his five decades-long artistic career. This marks Nhlengethwa’s first solo exhibition in London, following a smaller presentation of his work in London last year as well as a recent solo exhibition at the Rupert Museum in Stellenbosch, South Africa.
The Landscape: From Arcadia to the Urban
7 August - 17 September, 2021
gallery rosenfeld is proud to present its second exhibition dedicated to the landscape, titled ‘The Landscape – From Arcadia to the Urban’. The exhibition will reflect on how the seventeenth and eighteenth century vision of a perfect idyllic natural world radically altered with the advent of the industrial revolution and move of people from the countryside to the cities was reflected in changing attitudes to what constituted a landscape. The exhibition will feature seven artists: Inna Artemova, Araminta Blue, Armin Boehm, Piero Pizzi Cannella, Lu Chao, Leonardo Drew, Levi van Veluw and Bogdan Vladuta. In addition, we shall be exhibiting two old masters one of which encapsulates an idea of ‘Arcadia’, whilst the other illustrates a very different idea of a pure landscape.
